An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.

What We Told the State Education Commissioner

Related School

Librado Romero/The New York TimesKatherine Sprowal and her son, Matthew, last summer.

A few Saturdays ago, while taking a break from the black and Latino caucus meetings in Albany, I was eating lunch with Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters.
We saw the state education commissioner, John B. King Jr., having
lunch three tables away. He was on his way to a meeting, but we said
hello and he stopped for a few minutes so we could talk.
Leonie introduced me as a parent whose child was counseled out of Harlem Success charter
following 12 days of kindergarten, after the principal told me there
was something wrong with him and he needed to transfer to another
school.
As I briefly recounted Matthew’s story, the commissioner said he remembered reading about it in The New York Times. I asked him what he thought of it. He said that he wasn’t sure and there were always two sides to every story.
I went on to tell him that Matthew’s fate was not unique, but that he
had been isolated from the rest of class the first day of school with
four other boys. (One of the boys was African-American like Matthew,
another was an African immigrant, and the two others were Latino.)
Administrators at the school separated out the five of them and had
them sit at a separate table at the back of the classroom, and within
days, one by one, all of these little boys had disappeared.
Leonie pointed out to Commissioner King that the amendment to the
charter law passed in 2011 required detailed reporting on student
attrition rates at every charter school, and that the state had still
not come up with guidelines as to how this reporting should be done.
She suggested that the state require charter schools to report on how
many kids enter the school and how many leave each month, because these
schools often hide their real attrition rates by enrolling new students
over the course of the year.
She also said that the state should track the attrition rates for
each Charter Management Organization, and carefully analyze them before
allowing any one of these organizations to expand and replicate their
schools across the city. Dr. King nodded his head, but said that the
same reporting should be required for regular public schools, as there
was much “mobility” among their students as well.
But that is not my experience or Matthew’s. In fact, at the public
school that he has attended since he left Harlem Success, the
administration has been nothing but supportive of him and his special
needs while recognizing that he is also highly gifted. Despite many ups
and downs, never once have they suggested to me that he leave the
school.
Then we started in on the new teacher evaluation system that had just
been agreed upon in Albany. Like the teacher data reports that were
released late last month, the system will rank teachers on the basis of
their students’ change in test scores over the course of a year. Under
the state framework, that ranking will be part of a broader assessment.
I said that two weeks ago, Matthew scored at the highest level in his
class on the Acuity test, an interim assessment of reading and writing.
Since then, however, his medication for A.D.H.D. has had to be
altered, and his academic and behavioral status has declined sharply.
He just took another Acuity assessment a few days ago that his
teacher showed me. It was illegible, incomprehensible and would have
scored a level 1 — the lowest score possible. If this had been his
final test of the year, his teacher would have been penalized unfairly
for something completely out of her control.
Dr. King responded that Matthew was only one child out of the entire
class, and his results would have been averaged with the rest of the
students. Leonie pointed out that statistically, at the classroom
level, studies show that gains and losses in annual test scores are
30-60 percent random (as this study shows.)
Dr. King said that research had shown
that so-called value-added gains are a stronger predictor of
performance than principal observations alone. (In an e-mail message
later, through a spokesman, he said the best system relies on multiple
measures, which has always been his position. “We have always insisted
on a multiple-measures evaluation system, and to imply otherwise is
false.”)
Leonie repeated that the percentile ranking of a teacher in terms of
growth scores from one year to the next was highly erratic, and that a teacher who ranked in the bottom 25 percent could be in the top 25 percent a year later.
In any case, according to the evaluation system the state will be using,
a teacher will be rated ineffective overall if he or she is rated
ineffective on the scores alone. Two years of “ineffective” rankings and
the teacher could be let go.
I interjected that judging Matthew’s teacher by means of test results
would not only be unfair to her, but could fundamentally alter the
dynamics of their relationship, if she had to worry about how he would
score rather than his emotional or mental well-being.
I described how one day recently, Matthew’s mental state unraveled
and he spent hours on the floor of the classroom in tears. Instead of
berating him or asking me to take him home (which is what used to happen
at Harlem Success if he didn’t follow strict instructions), his teacher
went out of her way to be nurturing and caring, and simply moved him to
the carpet and let him be, until he cried himself to sleep.
This is the sort of thing that public school teachers do every day.
Where is the scoring system for that? How will her consistent
encouragement and support of Matthew be incorporated into her evaluation
at the end of the year?
The system that the state has now mandated will ignore so much of
what makes this teacher great. It is unfair to her, and it is unfair to
children like Matthew.

Katherine Sprowal is a member of the District 3/P.S. 75 P.T.A.
and School Leadership Team, a Local Parent Community Organizer, a former
Harlem Success Academy charter school parent and a Harlem resident.

When a charter school tries to move out a student it thinks
will perform poorly on standardized tests, who is to blame? The school,
whose very existence is predicated on achieving better results on these
tests than traditional public schools? Or the state, which creates this
perverse incentive in the first place? We know that student performance
on these tests tracks family income more closely than any other measure
-- school size, class size, unionized or non-unionized teachers -- you
name it. So when the schools are compelled to improve these scores at
all costs, the highest cost will inevitably be paid by low-income
students, whose traditional schools are being shuttered only to have the
replacement charters close their doors on them. What I would tell the
education commissioner is that until teacher and school evaluations are
decoupled from standardized test scores, the responsibility for this
kind of outrage will be his.

Ms. Sprowal, thank you for seizing a moment and using it to
tell Matthew's "one story." It's most unfortunate Dr. King perceives
Traditional Public Education and it's students this way. Why? It
suggests that the Chancellor is out of touch with reality...Matthew's
"one story" is more pervasive, more common, more the norm than he's
aware.
Perhaps like most adults Dr. King has overcome incredible odds
himself (I do not know Dr. King personally). Perhaps, as he reflects on
his journey to success he's forgotten his own story. I forget the
challenges of my adolescence, the way I "froze" during standardized
tests and the way both of those factors altered my progress in High
School irrevocably.
When we dismiss each "one story" we consciously or unconsciously cut
ourselves off from what connects us to our own story, the children in
our lives, our community and how that thread is one of the most
essential aspects of education...the human thread.
Growing up was messy and chaotic and that didn't change after we -
all the grown ups - reached adulthood and began running the world.

What would I ask the commissioner? Why is there no way for
parents, as part of teacher evaluations, to report in detail the daily
acts of caring for students' emotional well-being that we know are
essential to good academic performance? When students are aware that
their parents and teachers have a strong relationship and regularly
share information and ideas about them -- which has been true for us
throughout our experience at three public schools in NYC -- their
academic performance will continually improve. Is there a way to
quantify this? Counting up how many emails teachers have sent to parents
at the crack of dawn or late in the evening? Giving a teacher a
numerical score when a bullying situation at school is resolved, and the
former bully and target become friends? When a teacher consoles a child
who's upset, there is no guarantee that will be reflected in this
year's test score. But it will be reflected in the likelihood that child
will stay in school and develop a love of learning.

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About Me

Norm Scott worked in the NYC school system from 1967 to 2002, spending 30 of those years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (District 14). He retired in July 2002. He has been active in education reform and in the UFT, often as a critic of union policy, since 1970, working with a variety of groups. In 1996 he began publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly. In 2002, he expanded the paper into a 16-page tabloid, printing up to 25,000 copies distributed to teacher mailboxes through Ed Notes supporters. Education Notes started publishing a blog in Aug. 2006. Norm also writes the School Scope education column for The Wave, the Rockaway Beach community newspaper.